Oracle is bringing in commercial extensions for the MySQL database that will split the commercial version of the software further away from the community edition.

Until now, the commercial and community versions of MySQL have stayed relatively similar, with the extras offered in the commercial Enterprise Edition not affecting common code. The Enterprise Edition came with Enterprise Monitor and Enterprise Backup, but these were extras.

The latest batch of changes to MySQL Enterprise Edition, introduced in version 5.5 and in the Developer releases of the forthcoming version 5.6, are more central. One such change is a Thread Pool that makes use of available cores on systems with more than 16 cores to improve performance by between three and 20 times. According to Oracle, Thread Pool is a thread-handling model designed to reduce overhead in managing client connections and statement execution threads. Also on offer are support for Windows Clustering and an Oracle Virtual Machine template. The Oracle VM template provides a pre-installed and pre-configured virtualized software image to make it easier to deploy MySQL to virtual environments and to “eliminate configuration efforts and risks”.

Finally, new security options are being provided with a pluggable authentication API that allows users to be authenticated using external libraries and directories. You can use the API to build your own custom modules that integrate MySQL into your existing security system. MySQL Enterprise Edition also makes use of the API to provide ready-to-use external authentication modules that authenticate users via Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) on LDAP, Linux and Kerberos, or using Windows services.